Austen Chamberlain

Austen Chamberlain (16 October 1863-17 March 1937) was Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom from 3 November 1924 to 4 June 1929, succeeding Ramsay MacDonald and preceding Arthur Henderson. A member of the Conservative Party, he was the son of Joseph Chamberlain and the half-brother of Neville Chamberlain.

Biography
Joseph Austen Chamberlain was born in Birmingham, England on 16 October 1863, the half-brother of Neville Chamberlain and the son of Joseph Chamberlain. He was educated at Rugby and studied at Cambridge before entering Parliament in 1892 as the Liberal Unionist Party (later Conservative Party) MP for East Worcestershire. As a loyal mouthpiece of his father, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1903 to 1905, but his identification with the tariff reform campaign precluded him from the leadership in 1911. He served as Secretary of State for India from 1915 to 1917, and he resigned over alleged blunders in the Mesopotamia campaign, for which he accepted ministerial responsibility. As a Minister without Portfolio from 1918, he again became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1919 and leader of the Conservative Party in 1921, but loyalty to David Lloyd George led to his refusal to replace him as Prime Minister. When the Conservatives opposed the continuing of its coalition with Lloyd George in 1922, Chamberlain rresigned as leader, thus becoming the only Conservative leader in the twentieth century never to be Prime Minister. He made peace with the party in 1923, and he served as Stanley Baldwin's Foreign Secretary from 1924 to 1929, rescheduling German reparation payments through the Dawes Plan, which earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. He also had an important role in securing the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, encouraging France to adopt a more conciliatory stance towards Germany in order to assist Gustav Stresemann with his peaceful revision of the Treaty of Versailles. His adherence to fair trade and his mercantile Birmingham roots hampered his political career, and his attempts to shake off those deficiencies hindered him, leading him to an exaggerated sense of honor and loyalty. He died in London in 1937.